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Chapter: The Undeath of the Author
“The author is dead, says Barthes, with a bloody sledgehammer hidden behind his back. There is a faint, muffled moaning and groaning in the background, and we may begin to suspect that the author isn’t quite as dead as promised, maybe a little less dead than we might hope, and Barthes evidently thinks so too, because off he disappears, apparently to finish the job. But what fresh nightmare waits for him in those splattered walls? Is it the gasping groan of a slight distance from death, or is it the banshee’s cry of a thing beyond death, past death and through death and going strong, far to the other side? Beyond death, past death, through death; died, buried and undead, undying, a spook, a ghost, a sprite, a skeleton, rasping, gasping and stained bloody, transformed, transmogrified.
We have killed the author, but our methods were not ideal. We have killed the author, and how? We have arranged to have her bitten by a werewolf. We have fed her soup laced with the blood of a zombie. We mummified her, then decorated her with an ancient, cursed amulet. We threw her into a vat of deadly chemicals. We sent a vampire to drink her blood. None of these methods have had the desired effect; the author is dead, that is to say, undead, that is to say gone but ever-present, gone but mutant, mutated, back with a vengeance.
There is a spectre haunting Europe, and this time it isn’t communism; it’s Dickens and Bronte and Wilde and Kafka and Austin and De Sade and all the rest of them, howling hungry ghosts, with red eyes and red pens and they say, ‘this means that’ and, ‘that means this’.
The author is dead, we were promised, but here they are, back again, only a little different. They were going to kill all the authors, they were going to put them in the big machine called Author-B-Gone but somewhere deep in the machine something took place that we weren’t quite ready for, and the creature that stands before us is new but old and we think that maybe that arm looks a little like Ms Rowling, and the eyes are maybe Mr Shakespeare and the chin seems slightly Orwellian, but it’s hard to tell since the whole creature has been dipped in tar and wrapped in metal, and plated with iron blades.
The authors had to be killed, we were told, because if they don’t die, they will ruin everything. You’ll be reading your book, and over your shoulder will peep Mr Conrad warbling about the symbolism of ivory, or watching a film when Baz Lurhmann comes in to talk about the soundtrack. All that will remain will be the text, we were told, but there’s more than the text, because as we try to take it and consume it, love it, hold it close, we are still aware of a pair of occult hands that caress us and start to create form, start to make shape, start to point to symbolism and rhythm and rhyme and connotations and denotations. They killed the author, then mutilated and reanimated her. They killed the author and boiled her down into soup, then tipped over the soup so it could take a hideous, mutant form, and slop and slurp its way into every temple of literature, an angry God that could never be appeased.
The author is dead, long live the author! The author is dead, and looking fitter than ever! The author is armed with heavy artillery, powerful weaponry. The author is putting the books in the freezer, casting them in iron, etching them in stone. They are threading long sharp wires into every word to lend them weight, to give them strength, to render them indestructible. There are many meanings in a text, all sorts of meanings to be found, and the meanings you find are between you and the text, we are told, AND YET, why does it feel that if you step too far from a very narrow set of possibilities, you will be gobbled up by those hungry ghosts, those sprites and zombies and vampires?
The author is dead, like Hitler, and alive, like Hitler, like Stalin, like Nurse Ratchet and we can moan and ask the impotent question, what is this all for? Around what principle, what ideology, around what planet circle these moons of meaning? What authoritarian fever dream compels these ghosts and ghouls and greeblies to sneak up upon us and bark their commands, gnash their teeth and flash their creepy claws? There was a spectre haunting Europe, the last one, the communist one, and it destroyed the state and the state rose again. Here’s to the new boss! The same as the old boss! The King is dead, long live the King! Killed and reanimated, killed and reanimated, a state from a state, an author from an author, an authority from an authority from an authority from an authority, and bro, please, I just want to live in a world where Ron and Harry grow up and have amazing gay sex, and where Gatsby is a black man, and where Mother! is completely literal and where Jane Eyre is an anti-capitalist text and where The Scream is actually a real-ass dog, where Mercutio is non-binary, and Romeo is three kids in a trench coat, and I hear the screams from the darkness beneath and I put back the book.
The author is dead, undead, can never die, can never live, and there is nothing but the text, but the contains the author, in all their infinite horror and authority, and if you shake the book you’ll see it; a million full-stops tumble out, a million tiny authors multiply like flies and spawn into ghosts and ghoulies and grow into skeletons and Hitler-Stalins and there’s no stupid questions except the one you’re about to ask, and there’s no wrong answers except the one you’re about to give and the author is dead but not gone, not nearly gone, not nearly gone, killed and reanimated, a state from a state, an author from an author, an authority from an authority from an authority from an authority
BUY AS...
PATREON BUNDLE (Chasing Eris, Spam Bot Love Song, United We Fnord, Si Nos Organizamos, ※, Faking Eris)
Digital Copy from Blurb:
We have killed the author, but our methods were not ideal. We have killed the author, and how? We have arranged to have her bitten by a werewolf. We have fed her soup laced with the blood of a zombie. We mummified her, then decorated her with an ancient, cursed amulet. We threw her into a vat of deadly chemicals. We sent a vampire to drink her blood. None of these methods have had the desired effect; the author is dead, that is to say, undead, that is to say gone but ever-present, gone but mutant, mutated, back with a vengeance.
There is a spectre haunting Europe, and this time it isn’t communism; it’s Dickens and Bronte and Wilde and Kafka and Austin and De Sade and all the rest of them, howling hungry ghosts, with red eyes and red pens and they say, ‘this means that’ and, ‘that means this’.
The author is dead, we were promised, but here they are, back again, only a little different. They were going to kill all the authors, they were going to put them in the big machine called Author-B-Gone but somewhere deep in the machine something took place that we weren’t quite ready for, and the creature that stands before us is new but old and we think that maybe that arm looks a little like Ms Rowling, and the eyes are maybe Mr Shakespeare and the chin seems slightly Orwellian, but it’s hard to tell since the whole creature has been dipped in tar and wrapped in metal, and plated with iron blades.
The authors had to be killed, we were told, because if they don’t die, they will ruin everything. You’ll be reading your book, and over your shoulder will peep Mr Conrad warbling about the symbolism of ivory, or watching a film when Baz Lurhmann comes in to talk about the soundtrack. All that will remain will be the text, we were told, but there’s more than the text, because as we try to take it and consume it, love it, hold it close, we are still aware of a pair of occult hands that caress us and start to create form, start to make shape, start to point to symbolism and rhythm and rhyme and connotations and denotations. They killed the author, then mutilated and reanimated her. They killed the author and boiled her down into soup, then tipped over the soup so it could take a hideous, mutant form, and slop and slurp its way into every temple of literature, an angry God that could never be appeased.
The author is dead, long live the author! The author is dead, and looking fitter than ever! The author is armed with heavy artillery, powerful weaponry. The author is putting the books in the freezer, casting them in iron, etching them in stone. They are threading long sharp wires into every word to lend them weight, to give them strength, to render them indestructible. There are many meanings in a text, all sorts of meanings to be found, and the meanings you find are between you and the text, we are told, AND YET, why does it feel that if you step too far from a very narrow set of possibilities, you will be gobbled up by those hungry ghosts, those sprites and zombies and vampires?
The author is dead, like Hitler, and alive, like Hitler, like Stalin, like Nurse Ratchet and we can moan and ask the impotent question, what is this all for? Around what principle, what ideology, around what planet circle these moons of meaning? What authoritarian fever dream compels these ghosts and ghouls and greeblies to sneak up upon us and bark their commands, gnash their teeth and flash their creepy claws? There was a spectre haunting Europe, the last one, the communist one, and it destroyed the state and the state rose again. Here’s to the new boss! The same as the old boss! The King is dead, long live the King! Killed and reanimated, killed and reanimated, a state from a state, an author from an author, an authority from an authority from an authority from an authority, and bro, please, I just want to live in a world where Ron and Harry grow up and have amazing gay sex, and where Gatsby is a black man, and where Mother! is completely literal and where Jane Eyre is an anti-capitalist text and where The Scream is actually a real-ass dog, where Mercutio is non-binary, and Romeo is three kids in a trench coat, and I hear the screams from the darkness beneath and I put back the book.
The author is dead, undead, can never die, can never live, and there is nothing but the text, but the contains the author, in all their infinite horror and authority, and if you shake the book you’ll see it; a million full-stops tumble out, a million tiny authors multiply like flies and spawn into ghosts and ghoulies and grow into skeletons and Hitler-Stalins and there’s no stupid questions except the one you’re about to ask, and there’s no wrong answers except the one you’re about to give and the author is dead but not gone, not nearly gone, not nearly gone, killed and reanimated, a state from a state, an author from an author, an authority from an authority from an authority from an authority
BUY AS...
PATREON BUNDLE (Chasing Eris, Spam Bot Love Song, United We Fnord, Si Nos Organizamos, ※, Faking Eris)
Digital Copy from Blurb:
...
